Here’s an oldie but goodie about the secret of success in creative work. It was a talk given by Ira Glass which was then turned into an animation by David Shiyang Liu. It’s less than 2-minutes long and has some fantastic advice for creatives. I have witnessed a lot of friends in the industry really struggling with their own work right now and so I thought sharing this would be relevant for all those in the same position. Read after the jump for the entire quote.
Did you know there are currently 1.1 million working robots in the world? Artifical Intelligence is every where. Check out this infographic presnted by ClickSoftware.com to learn more about how Artificial Intelligence is taking over.
Big, bigger, but not yet biggest: According to the Association of American Publishers's StatShot study released Thursday, ebooks made up nearly a quarter (22.55%, to be precise) of U.S. trade publishers' book sales last year. That's up from 17% in 2011 and just 3% in 2009...
New tech industries start small but can grow into permanent, billion-dollar slices of infrastructure. Sometimes that seems to happen overnight — like with smartphones.
And sometimes it takes years — like with the dumbphones that grew like mold from the mid-1990s through the late 2000s.
And now, for example, the prevalence of smart mobile devices has spurred the mobile app industry, an entirely new piece of infrastructure which supports thousands of companies and billions of dollars in sales.
Earlier this month, the Bafta video game awards seemed to show an industry in rude health, with innovative indie titles sharing the honours with interesting mainstream success stories like Dishonored and Far Cry 3.
But with the cost of development rising, a new console generation on the horizon and radical new billing methods emerging (hello microtransactions!), this is also one of the most disruptive and unpredictable periods in the history of gaming.
So what happens next? After the awards, I sat down with four veteran developers who are also members of Bafta's video game committee, which oversees the organisation's gaming commitments: Harvey Elliott was a studio head at Electronic Arts before leaving to become MD of middleware specialist, Marmalde; Paulina Bozek, once the executive producer of Sony's SingStar series, now runs social games studio Inensu; Georg Backer is with Jonathan Ross's Hotsauce Interactive, after several years at Lionhead; and Andy Payne is MD of Mastertronic and chairman of industry trade body, UKIE.
Facebook's user-targeted ads have been fueling profits and unsettling privacy advocates since the beginning, but a new report shines a light on just how extensive the company's research is. As it turns out. Facebook's data-collection efforts don't stop once you leave their site. They don't even stop when you leave the internet.
This week, the New York Times shined a light on four companies contracted by Facebook to provide user data from outside the site — ranging from court records and survey data to point-of-purchase information collected by retailers. Combined with Facebook's internal analytics, it allows the company to build a comprehensive profile of each user, including information they haven't shared on the site, which allows advertisers to more accurately target specific demographics, or even specific users. In one example, Facebook targeted specific users with ads for items they had previous browsed on the e-commerce site JackThreads.
If you’re applying for a job then you’ll certainly need to have a resume that you have to submit to your desired company or firm. This is usually the first and only document that an employer sees about you and this is what they will use in deciding whether or not they want to hire you. A typical resume has a quick summary of your key skills, your previous working experiences and your background education. It is primarily used to show your experience and skills that to make you suitable for the targeted job position. Creating a resume is actually very easy as you simply need to note all the important details about yourself and your professional career which is vital to your application. However the proper way of making a resume seems to be the problem of most applicants. Thankfully there are now resume samples that you can download online so you can have a document to refer to while making your own.
What’s Spec Work? In a few words it’s producing work and submitting it to a prospective client without ensuring that you will be paid and your rights will be respected.
Let’s take this scenario: you want to work for GreatTelevisions.com, so you design a new logo for them. You submit it in the hope they will like it and they may hire you for work. This may result in them signing a long-term contract with you, which you can use to also factor in the costs of the logo design. This is a common practice for some design agencies.
This practice has changed over time however and companies are crowdsourcing more and more work through contests, in the hope of luring many designers to submit drafts to them for free, while only one design will be picked.
Those who work in the creative field face most days with insurmountable pressure. Some go through it with grace, some with pulsating anger while some with a little bit of humor. Just like these hilarious confessions found on The Creative Confessional website, where the creatives squeal some of their random thoughts. Can you relate?(Just remember to read everything with a pinch of salt!)
At least for right now, mobile games still rule the app world.
New research released by analyst firm Canalys shows that 24 of the 25 top grossing developers in the leading app stores are gaming companies.
Specifically, out of 700,000 apps in the world, Canalys found that 25 star developers accounted for about 50% of total app store revenue ($60 million of $120 million) during the first 20 days of November. All but one of those top developers were game developers.
Don't be afraid to explore foreign territory. We asked successful young entrepreneurs for their most poignant pieces of advice for founders starting up in an unfamiliar industry.
On Google's Q3 2012 earnings call yesterday, CEO Larry Page said the company had an $8 billion mobile revenue run rate, and CFO Patrick Pichette added, "Ads continue to be the bulk of [the $8 billion], the vast majority of it."
They declined to break that number down any further.
There's one major problem with this number...
Graphic design industry is an ever evolving field, full of potential and growth for those who pursue it passionately. Those who opt for graphic design as a profession have a variety of career options in different industries. To prosper in this field you will need a degree and a very strong portfolio to show your worth.
Here is an infographic that elaborates on the career options, required skills set and approximate salaries graphic designers can earn.
The wonderful world of freelancing can seem very appealing, especially in these tough economic times, being able to work your own hours and essentially becoming your own boss. No more office politics, long commutes and so on are just many of the aspects that appeal to people wanting to quit their office job and become a freelancer.
Many, perhaps hold an idealistic view of freelancing and if they were to quit their job tomorrow and launch their career as a freelancer they may find it’s not as rosy as they pictured. As a freelancer myself I hope to address some common misconceptions about freelancing and some of my own key learnings and advice for anyone considering freelancing.
The Forbes 400 is out and once again plenty of tech people made the list.
We've gathered the 15 richest people in tech on the list. The biggest change from last year is that Mark Zuckerberg has taken a big fall. Turns out the public markets don't value Facebook the way private markets did.
Other than Zuckerberg, just about everyone else's wealth grew as the markets were friendly to older, more traditional tech companies.
I majored in Industrial Design. During the course, however, I changed to visual design/graphic design. Even though I changed I always admired good industrial designs, especially because of all the considerations taken during the process. It's more than visual; there are materials, ways of production, logistics.
Christopher Stringer, a longtime member of Apple's industrial design team, had one of the most memorable moments of the ongoing patent trial when he revealed that most Apple products are initially designed by a small group of just 15 or 16 employees sitting around a kitchen table.
While Stringer didn't name names, that group is almost certainly Apple's elite Industrial Design Group. There are plenty of other designers who work at Apple, but this group literally gives shape to Apple's products.
The only truth about the buisness in the music industry. A comic by The Oatmeal.
Before getting into the evanescent nature of the software industry, it is important to first shed some light upon its history and origin.
The word ‘software’ was first coined by chance in 1953. It was then published for the first time in 1960’s, when computers were manufactured only by a few commercial and private computer vendors like UNIVAC and IBM. The ‘Computer Usage Company’ was the first to construct software and provide related services. The software industry began to expand when the use of computers became more common in business, universities, hospitals and at government offices. These expanded the demand for the softwares as per their specific requirements.
According to MobiThinking, 86.7% of the world’s population are mobile subscribers. 1.2 billion of this percentage are mobile web users and 25% of mobile web users only use mobile web or very rarely use desktop websites.
In 1996, Nokia launched a very early version of the first ever smartphone. 16 years later we are a smartphone civilization. We have the internet in our back pockets. We share our lives minute by minute via social media, texting and emailing.
In another study by MobiThinking, they found that globally, mobile page views have nearly doubled in the year between May 2011 and May 2012.
